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Oh, journal! What a long, strange couple of months it's been. I almost don't even know where to start.

Since it's November, I'm participating in NaNoWriMo as I do every year. I've written close to 60K words on an Epic Zombie Masterpiece that is currently lacking zombies. I nearly gave myself a week long heart attack when my computer caught a nasty virus about a week and a half ago and I had to reformat the hard drive. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue since I keep all the important stuff on my external hard drive. However, this virus snuck in and hid all my external hard drive files.

I went from being at 32K words on my NaNo story to...OMG!WHERE'D IT GO? over the course of one agonizing night. I persevered and kept writing, despite not knowing what was going to happen with the first half of my novel or even if I'd be able to retrieve it. Fortunately, I have an awesome cousin who popped over one night and found all the files and fixed them up for me right good.

This was just about the most fantastic thing ever and I'm so thrilled to say that everything has now been recovered and backed up in triplicate. Also, I have so kicked NaNo's ass this year.

I've been very neglectful of all my online sites lately as I attempted to get things up and running, blah, blah, blah. However, Twitter and I have become extremely close and I'm turning into an insane tweeter. INSANE.

I started a marathon Buffy rewatch the other day and I'm halfway through season 2 now. Cole's watching it with me because the family that watches Buffy together, stays together. Now, I don't think I've watched Buffy since season 7 ended all those years ago. That's a cushion of a lot of years we're looking at. For the most part, the show has held up nicely. And then Buffy holds up her pager and tells Giles "If the apocalypse comes, beep me" and I dissolve into giggles.

Also, those huge ass computer monitors Willow's using in the library? Do you remember when the monitor took up the entire desktop? I DO!

Anyway. I have some GREAT Twitter conversations to share...

I bought a pair of fishnet thigh highs the other day and tweeted that I couldn't decide if I'm looked like a hooker or the leg lamp from A Christmas Story. Amanda came back with this...

And this...

Bwahahahahaha!

Meanwhile, despite what I say about him publicly, Keith Melton is slightly amusing. He might lie all the time but he comes up with little nuggets like this upon occasion to make up for it...

Have I ever mentioned that Jodi Redford and I bonded over the lack of puffer fish sex in books? True story. We have a long, complex relationship based on amphibious critters. Could you imagine the two of us meeting in real life?

And finally... I'm working on another story. One spawned on Twitter by an off the cuff tweet, it's taken on a life of its own and ... well, it's weird.

Yep. Now I'm going to go stalk... I mean, talk to people on Twitter to see what other little gems pop up.

Randomly, I'll be in Menlo Park tomorrow at Kepler's Books to meet Scott Westerfeld. He wrote the amazing Uglies books and the steampunk-y Leviathan trilogy. If anyone's going to be around, I'll be the one taking pictures of my feet and talking loudly about the delicious hard cider I can get at the bar next to the bookstore.

Yes, werewolves are a common theme in my tweets. That and severed heads. Go figure.

Rehvenge is my book boyfriend from the Black Dagger Brotherhood series by J.R. Ward. When Rehvenge tweets me I lose all ability to form sentences.

Smurf Boobs. Smurf boobs and quirk. *nods*

So, yeah. Since this was a tiny, tiny snapshot of how I spend my days while at work, you can imagine how some of these conversations evolve. You can apparently always find me on Twitter. Join me and be afraid!

Arrgh! Yesterday got away from me so today I'm making an effort to get this journal done early. Look at me, being all proactive and stuff!

So. Since last I posted an update that didn't involve 9,000 book review links, things have been happening. Not really. I'm just as boring as always but I'm going to make it seem interesting so you'll be all "Dude! Things happen!" Yeah. It'll be awesome.

School's in full swing for Cole. I had to go in and talk to his counselor because he's the only 7th grader in his Algebra 1 class and I wanted to make sure he was where he was supposed to be. It turns out he's exactly where he's supposed to be since he scored ridiculously high on his state test scores. He hated the class the first week (what with being the youngest and the only one who didn't know anyone) but it seems like it's coming together for him. Which is good because I don't want him dreading a class he's going to have all year when he's only in the 2nd week of school.

In the post of 9,000 links, I mentioned that I signed up for a week long Read-A-Thon with some of my book blogging buddies. I set a goal for myself to read 15 books over the week. I picked all the books ahead of time because I work better when I have a plan and all that jazz. I read 13 of the 15 I picked plus another 5 random books that popped up on my radar. EIGHTEEN BOOKS, PEOPLE! I had to push myself for those last few and I think I took a 5 hour nap after the week was over, but... I had FUN!

In more recent news, on Friday when I was taking the dogs on a walk I found a kitten sitting by a tree. The poor thing barely moved when the dogs lunged over to sniff it and I couldn't in good conscience leave it there. So I tromped home, got our cat carrier, did some kitten rescue, brought it home, fed it and let it get its strength up. When Heather and Hailey got home, we went out to make sure there weren't any other kittens tucked away in the same area. Sure enough, we found a second one. We managed to wrangle that one into the cat carrier (after my mom was bit and clawed and dripped blood all over the sidewalk) and brought it home to regain its strength with its sibling. Currently, both kittens are ensconced in our downstairs bathroom with food, water and a nice warm bed. My mom's on industrial sized antibiotics and it looks like we have 2 new cats.

I have MORE to talk about but I'm going to save it for later. Unless I forget.

Meanwhile, books...Book #352 - The Line (Line #1) by Teri Hall - I didn't love this book. I wanted to but I had some issues with the simplified writing and the fact that there was no resolution AT ALL to the storyline. That said, I now feel a deep, dark urge to read the next book just so I can get some closure.Book #353 - Soul Survivor by Misty Evans - Time travel, soul mates and one seriously nasty bad guy.Book #354 - The Iron Daughter (Iron Fey #2) by Julie Kagawa - I love this series. Which is a good thing since I'm going to be zipping through the next book so I can review book 4 before it comes out in October.In My Mailbox - I know this looks like I scored a lot of books this week but it's only because I forgot to post last week's IMM and had to combine it with this week's. So, you know. I did score a lot but it was over a two week period.

So. It looks like I'm back form my unintended hiatus. I have no excuse except that I wasn't in the mood to journal. So, I didn't. Yeah. I'm planning on putting a second post up sometime in the very near future to babble about eveyrthing that's happened to me these last few weeks, but this post is going to be all about books. Sorry. See, I joined a week long read-a-thon and read a ridiculous amount of books and I've been posting reviews like a crazy woman. Which isn't all that different from what I normally do except that I got to brag over that week about how many books I read. It was awesome.

Anyway. I have close to 40 books I've reviewed and haven't posted here and I'm nothing if not determined to wear my fingers to the bone typing up links and witty remarks.

Between last night and this afternoon I had the strangest Twitter conversation. The strangest. It started between author Jodi Redford and I and ended up as a 5+ way convo between several authors and myself. What was it about? Mainly, puffer fish and all the sex that they don't have. O.o Yes, you read that correctly.

Somehow in the middle of all that I managed to finish reading Maximum Witch by Jodi Redford. This book is the whole reason the puffer fish conversation started and when I reviewed it this morning I wrote "Jodi Redford writes the best non-puffer fish sex I've read all week." Well, you can see that quote in all it's glory on Jodi's website now. There was even talk of glittery gif puffer fish to accent it.

Don't be jealous that you didn't think up a quote that spaztastic first. Some of us are just gifted in ways that defy explanation.

It probably goes without saying that I had a lot of coffee today (hence the continuation of the puffer fish convo) but that entire tweet stream is motherfucking gold, people. If you're not following me and everyone I follow on Twitter, you're totally missing out. Totally.

Okay. I'm going to crack open my Epic Werewolf Masterpiece #1 (and there's a story about how I cut over half the book because I was unhappy with how my two halves weren't matching up) and WRITE!Later, skaters!

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening babysitting my baby nephew Ryan. I love the kid but when he cries for 30 minutes straight because he's too tired to do anything else... not fun. Anyway. That's obviously why I didn't journal yesterday. You know, since I vowed that I would get back to blogging on a more regular basis. Sadly, I was tired by the time I got home. I went to bed. The end.

Uggh. I don't want to talk about how many days it's been since I last blogged. Terrible, Kelly. Absolutely terrible.

The problem with not blogging on a regular basis is that I have all these brilliant things to talk about and by the time a few days have passed they've all fractured inside my head and I'm left with bits and pieces. These bits and pieces don't make sense now. It's like watching the last three minutes of The Matrix, the middle three minutes of Matrix Reloaded and the first three minutes of Matrix Revolutions. THERE IS NO CONTINUITY LEFT! I'm looking for some and I end up with "Hailey is shiny!" and "Bwahahaha! RUBY!"

No one wants to read about that!

However, since I'm talking about random things, I watched Mega Python vs Gatoroid this morning on Netflix. Wow. Just... wow. It was so bad I couldn't stop watching. I'm sorry but Tiffany overacts and Debbie Gibson... well, she overacts, too. There was a lot of overacting. And a lot of giant pythons and swelled up gators. Honestly, I couldn't make that up. Well, I could. But I didn't.

Where did this week go? It can't be Thursday night already. It can't be. I'm sure it's only Monday. Possibly Tuesday.

I came home from work today and took a nap. After I dragged myself out of bed I managed to wander downstairs and collapse in an ungainly heap at the kitchen table while my sister made spaghetti. I told her that I had the weirdest dream while I was napping and she was all "How the hell can you dream during a nap? When I nap I can hear Hailey talking and stuff." Me - "I don't know. I sleep hard."

Don't other people dream when they nap? I mean, I know normal people don't nap for 2 to 3 hours at a time so maybe I'm just freaky like that. Whatever. It was a weird, cool, awesome dream I had during my nap. I was pleased to have had it.

Hey! Yesterday's posting didn't screw up. I'm so happy about this. I have excitement! Since that worked so well, I'm going to stick with DW for a while. Yay!

On an entirely unrelated note, I'm going to have to start looking for a new job again. Or, not start. I'm going to have to find a new job. Like, yesterday. No, I haven't been fired. I'm only working part time right now and I'm sadly broke. Sadly, sadly, sadly without money. So, either I keep the job I'm currently working at (which I like) and get a second job on top of it or I find something full time. Period. Going full time would help a lot because then I wouldn't be paying my own medical. That's a killer. A kill-eh. If I didn't have that stupid bill I would still be broke just not as badly.

This is my inaugural post trying the cross-posting feature from Dreamwidth to LJ. I'm going to assume I'm going to do something wrong somewhere and will have to spend hours tonight trying to undo it. I mean, that's about par for the course for me. So, you know, okay. I'm resigned to it.

On the other hand, if everything goes perfectly, I'm going to do a little jig. And praise Dreamwidth from here to the great beyond for making things easy on poor, confused souls like me.

Anyway. I've had the Dreamwidth account for a while and I've been using it as a backup for LJ. And by that I mean that I've been importing the content from LJ whenever I remember to. Which is about every three months or so. Yeah. I'm not so good about remembering. However, if I decide to go this route, I won't have to worry about importing. I'll have all my mental diarrhea automatically strewn across the internet. Isn't that fabulous?

The point I'm trying (badly) to make here is that I have a Dreamwidth account. If you're so inclined, you can add me over on DW and I'll be all happy and joyful. Otherwise, I still plan on checking LJ and responding to comments and what have you. Not that there's a whole lot of commenting going on anymore. Which is not a complaint, just an observation. Hell, I'm not the greatest commenter in the world so I have no cause to berate others.

As a reminder, I'm on Twitter pretty much daily. If you do that Twitter thing and don't mind tipsy tweets and talk about how my mom and dad named my sisters and I after colors, follow me there and let me know so I can follow you back.

Do you guys see what happens when I don't have access to LJ for a few days? I lose my journal writing momentum and then days and days and DAYS pass without a journal. I even wrote a list up yesterday of things I wanted to get done while at work and update ye olde LJ was on it. Yet, it didn't get done. I did everything else on the list. Just not that.

I am horrible.

But now I'm going to get right back on that momentum horse and not let my slackerish tendencies control me. Because I'm strong like that.

Since we're talking about momentum and other scintillating things, I'm having a crisis with my Epic Werewolf Masterpiece #1. I originally had great plans to add a bunch of stuff to the narrative to expand the time frame of the story and then link the new writing back up with what I wrote way back when. The thing is, the more I add to the story the less likely it looks like the original scenes will be able to merge with the updated timeline. It's just not going to work. I can see the main female character changing as I write it. She's growing in ways she wasn't able to in the shortened timeline I wrote originally. This is a good thing because the entire reason I decided to add narrative was to make her growth more realistic. Yet, now the growth she's experiencing makes her later actions out of character.

What a conundrum!

I think I'm going to cut the entire end of the book and just let this new story unfurl. Of course that'll mean that EWM#2 will have to be completely rewritten as well. *face palm* Still, it's better for the book and for the characters that it plays out this new way. I can handle some hardcore rewriting. Or just, writing.

Dude. How the hell is it almost August? I honestly didn't realize it until I typed the date in that last link. Whoa. Just, whoa.

Alright. I vow to be a better blogger and post more than once a week. Also, I might be relocating to Dreamwidth and crossposting those posts over to here. I don't know. I'm very torn about giving up on LJ as my main blogging place. I've been here for quite a while, you know. Quite.A.While.

Cole's been watching Naruto the last few days and it's kinda annoying me. I really don't remember it being so ... loud. And braying. God, I feel like I'm getting old when cartoons are starting to bug the fuck out of me. The loudness is especially annoying because I'm trying to finish up a scene in the EWM#1 and I really can't concentrate with it blaring behind me. You might be thinking "Well, Kelly. Send Cole out of your room and you won't have to listen to that damn show." You'd be correct. Yet, I'd rather bitch at the moment.

I'm pleased to announce that I finished reading the last of the Black Dagger Brotherhood books I own. It was an emotional journey, yet I did it.

I think I want to attempt to finish that EWM#1 scene one more time. Which means I have to babble about books for a minute...Book #293 - Lover Mine (Black Dagger Brotherhood #8) by J.R. Ward - Outstanding worldbuilding, characters that don't quit and storylines that are revisited and expanded brilliantly... I'm in love with this entire series. LOVE!

That last BDB book was a 2 day book. 2 days of concentrated reading. It was lengthy. And fabulous. I'm tempted to get the next in the series but I keep reminding myself that I want to wait until it comes out in paperback so it'll fit on the shelf with the rest of the BDB books. I know. Awesome plan.

I'm deep into finishing up book 6-8 in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. These books pretty much kill me. Every one of them. They have so much that happens with the secondary characters that it's amazing. Sometimes I get a little overwhelmed with all the emotion and action but at the same time it amazes me. Just... whoa.

Over the last few days I've been having a constant stream of plot running through my head regarding my Epic Werewolf Masterpiece #1. I can see where the editing needs to go in order to link it up to the part of the story that I've already written. This is exciting!

I did a whole lot of nothing today. Well... let me rephrase that: I did a whole lot of nothing outside of my house today. In fact, I barely got dressed. However, I finished up my epic retagging project over at Reading the Paranormal. It has made me hurt. Physically. My arm is aching from wrist to elbow. Now, it admittedly might have been me sleeping on it wrong or something (as an aside, my shoulder feels like I have a boulder under it) but I have a sinking suspicion that it was all the clicking and typing I was doing. I also have the food shakes at the moment. As in, I'm questioning whether I remembered to eat or not. Yeah, I really don't remember. Whatever. It'll go away. Or I'll die. I'm sure one of those things is bound to happen.

Oh, I also read a book. Like you didn't know that!Book #290 - Lover Enshrined (Black Dagger Brotherhood #6) by J.R. Ward - These books are not light reading. For all that they're oversexed and considered to be paranormal romances, they do some pretty heavy lifting. Plus, they are full of emotion. Or they elicit a rather strong emotional response from me. I didn't cry this time, though. I totally sucked it up and held it in. Barely, but I managed.

Since my arm feels like it's going to fall off and I might possibly die from forgetting to eat, I'm going to go. I have another 2 books and one short story to read by the end of this weekend. I'd best get to it.

Do you guys remember all the times that I got it in my head that I needed a project and then proceeded to choose the most INANE things to project on? Yeah. Me, too. Oh, the hijinks that ensued that time I decided that I was going to listen to every song on my iPod at least one time within a calendar year. And, of course, being that I can't just have a project but I have to have a project, dahling, I ended up listening to every song within a three month period. I think I had that iPod on constantly for weeks on end. Which is probably why it crashed and burned and left me weeping.

But I digress. I get it in my head that I need a project and somehow it blows up and ends up being a huge-ass experience and I'm like, "Whoa. What just happened?" Yeah, I totally channeled Keanu there. Whoa. Speaking of Keanu, for some reason I've been wanting to watch Johnny Mnemonic recently. I don't know why. That movie really isn't very good. I mean, if I'm going to go the Keanu route I should really go with The Matrix which is both entertaining and weirdly cool and not just weird. Right?

Anyway. My latest project. Yeah. I decided that I wanted to redo the tags at my book blog to make them more user friendly. That makes sense, right? Because people aren't going to bother going to your blog if they can't find the things they're looking for. I spent HOURS yesterday adding author names to all the posts. That's 750+ posts, guys. SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY PLUS! And I did it. And then I decided that while that was good, it wasn't good enough. Today I'm going back through those posts and re-tagging them to make them even easier to navigate. I think my head might explode. EXPLODE!

Why do I do this to myself? Oh, wait. I remember. It's because I have an excess of awesomeness. *face palm*

Two of my cousins and their respective husbands and girlfriends are in town. This means that the family gathered at Amb and Phil's house for dinner. There were drinks. I consumed a few. there was food. I ate well. There were many desserts. I did not share mine. My boy-cousin brought his new girlfriend. I imagine that meeting the entire family in one fell swoop is a frightening experience. We're loud. We tend to tell bawdy jokes. The jokes degenerate into downright dirty as the alcohol begins to flow.

Yeah. Scary.

I was going to make tonight an all night writing night but I don't think it's going to happen. As much as I want to, I'm exhausted at the moment. BECAUSE I MISSED MY NAP NOT BECAUSE I HAD A DELICIOUS BEVERAGE OR TWO. The good news is that I can bump my all-nighter over to Thursday night.

Speaking of writing, my girl-cousin had offered to do a read through for me on my Epic Werewolf Masterpiece. Due to the massive rewrite I'm subjecting it to it isn't quite ready for human consumption. In fact, it's something of a hot mess at the moment. I have faith that I'll whip it into something readable at some point but I wouldn't want to unnecessarily scar anyone by making them read an incoherent story. So, she's still planning on looking it over and I'm going to work my ass off to get it to a point where I don't mind someone reading it.

My favorite bibliophile who moved across the country but still manages to keep in touch like a CHAMP and prod me to write my part of our Zompocalypse story!Happy Birthday, oddmonster!

That's a lot of birthdays. I'm all worn out now.

Anyway. Onto the not as joyous stuff. As you can see, I'm online again after the Great Computer Outage of 2011. The technician ran a slew of tests and everything came back looking good. He admitted that there's been a lot of calls about slow and non-responsive internettedness and it looks like there are just too many people using too little ... whatever it's called. So, yeah. That sucks. But we're back up and running and we're going to try to keep track of when and how often we lose connection to see if it's worth changing providers. I'm not feeling terribly optimistic about this, to be honest. Meh. We'll see.

I have a terribly tragic story to tell. Terribly tragic. Like, small children and those easily driven to tears should avert their eyes. Not that small children should be reading my blog with how often I say "fuck" but that's beside the point.

I have no internet access at home. I KNOW! How can I go on?!?! Woe! *crumples dramatically and weeps* I'm going to be without it until Monday. MONDAY! It's like the world is telling me to get outside or get a life or something. I don't like it. I'm scared. Hold me.

In all seriousness, I don't know what's wrong with our connection. I swear that we paid the bill. I have a feeling that our modem just got fried and the technician is going to have to replace it. Oh, and the window they gave us for the tech to come by is from 8 AM to 7 PM. Dude, technician guy, you suck. You need an 11 hour window? Fuckers. All of them.

To make a long, tragic story short, I've been burning up the internet here at work today to soak it in so I don't go into withdrawal or something. I don't remember the last time I was offline for over 24 hours. I might end up stark raving mad and be one of those people you hear about on TV whose neigherbors are all "She was such a nice lady. We never expected this of her." Yeah.

Anyway. I have half an hour until I'm off work so I'd better not dally too long or I'll end up with a half-written post and an angry scowl.